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Abraham Maslow, I present to you Augustus Waters, whose existential curiosity dwarfed that of his well-fed, well-loved, healthy brethren. While the mass of men went on leading thoroughly unexamined lives of monstrous consumption, Augustus Waters examined the collection of the Rijksmuseum from afar.
“What?” Augustus asked after a while.
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence, didn’t know how to. “I’m just very, very fond of you.”
He smiled with half his mouth, his nose inches from mine. “The feeling is mutual. I don’t suppose you can forget about it and treat me like I’m not dying.”
“I don’t think you’re dying,” I said. “I think you’ve just got a touch of cancer.”
He smiled. Gallows humor. “I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up,” he said.
“And it is my privilege and my responsibility to ride all the way up with you,” I said.
“Would it be absolutely ludicrous to try to make out?”
“There is no try,” I said. “There is only do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
On the flight home, twenty thousand feet above clouds that were ten thousand feet above the ground, Gus said, “I used to think it would be fun to live on a cloud.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like it would be like one of those inflatable moonwalk machines, except for always.”
“But then in middle school science, Mr. Martinez asked who among us had ever fantasized about living in the clouds, and everyone raised their hand. Then Mr. Martinez told us that up in the clouds the wind blew one hundred and fifty miles an hour and the temperature was thirty below zero and there was no oxygen and we’d all die within seconds.”
“Sounds like a nice guy.”
“He specialized in the murder of dreams, Hazel Grace, let me tell you. You think volcanoes are awesome? Tell that to the ten thousand screaming corpses at Pompeii. You still secretly believe that there is an element of magic to this world? It’s all just soulless molecules bouncing against each other randomly. Do you worry about who will take care of you if your parents die? As well you should, because they will be worm food in the fullness of time.”
“Ignorance is bliss,” I said.
A flight attendant walked through the aisle with a beverage cart, half whispering, “Drinks? Drinks? Drinks? Drinks?” Gus leaned over me, raising his hand. “Could we have some champagne, please?”
“You’re twenty-one?” she asked dubiously. I conspicuously rearranged the nubbins in my nose. The stewardess smiled, then glanced down at my sleeping mother. “She won’t mind?” she asked of Mom.
“Nah,” I said.
So she poured champagne into two plastic cups. Cancer Perks.
Gus and I toasted. “To you,” he said.
“To you,” I said, touching my cup to his.
We sipped. Dimmer stars than we’d had at Oranjee, but still good enough to drink.
“You know,” Gus said to me, “everything Van Houten said was true.”
“Maybe, but he didn’t have to be such a douche about it. I can’t believe he imagined a future for Sisyphus the Hamster but not for Anna’s mom.”
Augustus shrugged. He seemed to zone out all of a sudden. “Okay?” I asked.
He shook his head microscopically. “Hurts,” he said.
“Chest?”
He nodded. Fists clenched. Later, he would describe it as a one-legged fat man wearing a stiletto heel standing on the middle of his chest. I returned my seat-back tray to its upright and locked position and bent forward to dig pills out of his backpack. He swallowed one with champagne. “Okay?” I asked again.
Gus sat there, pumping his fist, waiting for the medicine to work, the medicine that did not kill the pain so much as distance him from it (and from me).
